Tag: uber

Uber chaos

If this book creates an entire class of shitty founders, you’re welcome to call me up in a year and tell me that I failed. I hope that’s not the case. In general, I like to give young founders a little more credit. I have a lot of criticisms of the Valley, but I think people generally recognize what went wrong inside of Uber now, and have a sense of wariness around how they want their own company to grow. Uber is a case study in going totally off the rails. I hope folks learned from that and I think that’s already kind of happening. I don’t see folks holding up Uber as the ideal. There are some Kool-Aid drinkers that were early in Uber that still fiercely defend everything that they did, and I think it’s going to be harder for them to defend that as time goes on.

Uber is headed for a crash

What has made Uber a good deal for users makes it a lousy investment proposition. The notion that Uber, the most highly valued private company in the world, is a textbook “bezzle” — John Kenneth Galbraith’s coinage for an investment swindle where the losses have yet to be recognized — is likely to come as a surprise to its many satisfied customers. … Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi effectively admitted that Uber isn’t profitable in any market when you factor in corporate overheads.

Uber Bundles

The biggest payoff, though, comes from effectively bundling opportunities for drivers. The problem for any standalone restaurant delivery app is that the vast majority of orders come at lunch and dinner, but the driver may wish to work at other times of the day as well. With Uber that is easy: just pick up riders (Uber drivers can drive for just Uber, just Uber Eats, or both). In other words, Uber has more and more ways to monopolize a driver’s time, to the driver’s benefit personally and Uber’s benefit competitively.

Driven to Despair

In his column in Black Car News, Schifter railed against what he recognized as unfair competition. For decades, drivers had spent their own money to build what the city had effectively promised would be a municipally regulated monopoly on for-hire vehicles, investing 100s of millions of their hard-earned $ to buy city-issued medallions and pay for vehicles. Then, almost overnight, the long-standing rules of supply and demand were upended. “The customers just don’t care,” Schifter lamented in one column, essentially summing up Uber’s entire business model. “They want the lowest price, no matter what.”

The Uber Dilemma

Understanding that Benchmark is focused on achieving liquidity on its all-time greatest investment suggests 2 potential outcomes: The most straightforward is that Benchmark hopes to push Uber to an IPO sooner-rather-than-later; clearly Kalanick was an obstacle as CEO, and according to reports, has sought to reestablish control of the company via his control of the board, driving away Meg Whitman, who was reportedly Benchmark’s choice for CEO. This also explains the urgency of this suit: Benchmark is trying to prevent Kalanick from naming 2 more members to the board, further complicating the CEO selection process. The other potential outcome is that Benchmark is looking for an exit. Softbank, which is looking to dominate car-sharing globally, has reportedly had discussions with Benchmark and other investors about buying their shares; reports have been mixed as to who wants to make a deal — Kalanick or Benchmark — but if it is the latter a lawsuit is an excellent way of getting the former to agree to a sale.

Didi

it is wrong to obsess on uber. didi is way bigger.

“We do 20m rides per day, 3x everyone else, globally, added together.” — Didi Chuxing President Jean Liu at WSJ.D Live. “In September, we are greater than $20b run rate for annual gross bookings.”

Transportation-as-a-Service

any discussion of the threat self-driving cars poses to Uber tends to imagine a world where there are magically 10Ks if not millions of self-driving cars everywhere immediately. That simply isn’t practical from a pure logistics standpoint; the time it will take to build all of those cars — and, crucially, get government approval — is time Uber has to catch up.

Moreover, it’s not at all clear that Google will be willing to make the sort of investment necessary to build a self-driving fleet that could take on Uber. The company’s recent scale-back of Google Fiber is instructive in this regard: it is very difficult for a company built on search advertising margins to stomach the capital costs entailed in building out a fleet capable of challenging Uber in more than 1 or 2 markets.

Finally, as the incumbent in the transportation-as-a-service space Uber has the advantage of only needing to be good-enough. To the degree the company can build out UberPool and UberCommute, they can ensure that their own self-driving cars get first consideration from consumers trained to open their app whenever they are out and about.